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A poet more than thirty years old is simply an overgrown child.
H. L. Mencken
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H. L. Mencken
Age: 75 †
Born: 1880
Born: September 12
Died: 1956
Died: January 29
Autobiographer
Essayist
Historian
Journalist
Linguist
Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
Thirty
Poet
Simply
Child
Children
Years
Overgrown
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A critic is a man who writes about things he doesn't like.
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The most valuable of all human possessions, next to a superior and disdainful air, is the reputation of being well-to-do.
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The most popular man under a democracy is not the most democratic man, but the most despotic man. The common folk delight in the exactions of such a man. They like him to boss them. Their natural gait is the goose step.
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The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.
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Without a doubt there are women who would vote intelligently. There are also men who knit socks beautifully.
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Bridges would not be safer if only people who knew the proper definition of a real number were allowed to design them.
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Justice is what you get when you run out of money.
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There are two impossibilities in life: just one drink and an honest politician.
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Culture itself is neither education nor law-making: it is an atmosphere and a heritage.
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He slept more than any other president, whether by day or by night. Nero fiddled, but Coolidge only snored.
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In the United States...politics is purged of all menace, all sinister quality, all genuine significance, and stuffed with such gorgeous humors, such inordinate farce that one comes to the end of a campaign with one's ribs loose, and ready for King Lear, or a hanging, or a course of medical journals.
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A tin horn politician with the manner of a rural corn doctor and the mien of a ham actor
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War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.
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Capital punishment has probably been responsible for a good deal of human progress. The overwhelming majority of those executed were of the sort whose departures for bliss eternal improved the average intelligence and decency of the race.
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The Jews fastened their religion upon the Western world, not because it was more reasonable than the religions of their contemporaries - as a matter of fact, it was vastly less reasonable than many of them - but because it was far more poetical.
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Los Angeles: nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis.
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Of government, at least in democratic states, it may be said briefly that it is an agency engaged wholesale, and as a matter of solemn duty, in the performance of acts which all self-respecting individuals refrain from as a matter of common decency.
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What fetched me instantly (and thousands of other newcomers with me) was the subtle but unmistakable sense of escape from the United States.
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The editors are committed to nothing save this: to keep common sense as fast as they can, to belabor sham as agreeably as possible, to give civilized entertainment.
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